


The Presence Between

by Evandar



Series: Evandar's Fic_Promptly Fills [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-01
Updated: 2013-10-01
Packaged: 2017-12-28 02:59:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/986876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Evandar/pseuds/Evandar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are worse things to find in the fridge than a severed head.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Presence Between

John braces himself and opens the fridge door. It’s well-stocked with cheese and milk, bacon and sandwich stuff – even salad! – though it’s the bacon that he reaches for. Prize obtained, he shuts the door slightly harder than necessary and places the pack on the counter by the stove. Then he takes a deep breath and starts to cook.

It’s a Tuesday, but he and Mary are still on honeymoon, so there’s no rush. There’s no excuse not to have a lazy morning in bed with a bacon sandwich or two, no matter how much he sometimes wishes there was. It’s funny – not really – how much he misses his life being in near-constant peril. How much he misses coming back to the flat and finding Sherlock bored and flouncing about in a silk dressing gown, firing John’s gun at the walls; how he misses texts that call him across London just to lend a phone; how he misses the experiments on the table and in the microwave and how he never knew whether he was putting sugar in his tea or arsenic.

Even two years later, the normal, slow-paced life of a GP is chafing. It’s not fair on Mary. He knows it’s not fair on Mary, which is why he’s never admitted that honestly? (And he’d never thought he’d say this.) There are actually worse things to find in the fridge than a severed head and milk is one of them. Even just admitting that to himself makes him wonder if all Sherlock had done was screw him up even worse than Afghanistan ever could have.

Sherlock made him alive and it’s horribly, horribly unfair and more than a bit not good that the life he’d always wanted after leaving the army now feels more like a noose than a paradise. Sometimes he thinks Mary knows that, because sometimes he catches her watching him with sad eyes and a little smile that says she’s trying to accept that there are three people in her brand new marriage, and that one of them’s a ghost. 

She’s a wonderful woman, and he doesn’t deserve her. The saddest part is that she doesn’t seem to think she deserves any better. The Sherlock-shaped hole in his life is all John can see sometimes and now matter how hard he tries to ignore it, it’s not going away. All through their dating and now into the second week of his marriage, it’s still there – sulking on the couch, wrapped in a (shroud) sheet or dragging him on rooftop chases.

“You’re still grieving,” Mary tells him, and she’s a therapist (not, despite circumstances, his) so she should know. “It’s normal.”

John’s pretty sure it isn’t – that none of it is. Normality is dull, and Sherlock is a selfish enough bastard that he won’t let him have it even after his death.

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by a prompt on fic_promptly at Dreamwidth.
> 
> inoru_no_hoshi's prompt:  
>  _BBC Sherlock, John Watson & Sherlock Holmes, he never thought he'd say it, but there are actually worse things to find in the fridge than a severed head._


End file.
